If you are an intern and you still have an appetite for gold stars and metaphorical cookies, take it from me, your tongue is about to know nothing but quinoa. But once in a while, it comes in a chocolate bar, or something ridiculous, and things are good again.

Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace is something of a consolation prize I earned after a recent “well worth it” challenge. Thank you, my friendido. I will take this book with me to the grave.

There is a third concept, also from the world of mathematics: stochastic self-similarity. Stochastic simply means random or chance; self-similarity describes the phenomenon—found in everything from stock market fluctuations to seismic activity to rainfall—of patterns that look the same when viewed at different degrees of magnification. If you break off a branch of a tree and hold that branch upright, for example, it looks a lot like a little tree. A stretch of coastline has that craggy coastline shape whether it is glimpsed from a hang glider or from outer space. Look at a tiny section of a snowflake under a microscope, and it occurs all the time in nature—in cloud formations, in the human circulatory system, in mountain ranges, in theway fern fronds are shaped.”

I have been waiting for this concept all my life.
Remember that scene at the end of “War of the Worlds” (the Tom Cruise movie) where the camera just zooms and zooms out until the world fits in the shape of a water drop beading down the length of a leaf? Boom. Stochastic self-similarity.

Stochastic self-similarity is the reason we smirk at artists and designers, for better or for worse. Stochastic self-similarity prompted a urban designer to see people and streets the same way we see fish in streams (src).

Stochastic self-similarity is the reason I read books. While we are aaallll original, you’d be surprised how many people I’ve met in a book before I’ve met them in real life. I should clarify here, I don’t think Catmull goes far enough with this idea. Personally, I don’t believe stochastic self-similarity is equivocal to patterns. Patterns are tricky little things that should be left for data analysts and interior designers just emerging from beneath a rock. Patterns imply the idea that there is more than one thing at play. A pattern is a single unit in-and-of-itself, but it is also made up of a perfectly arranged set of some things. Oh hey, did you know this is BC’s tartan pattern? Anyway, I believe stochastic self-similarity is really only one thing “at different degrees of magnification.”

But that’s just me. Maybe there are more words I’m not think of that belong here.
Hey, go buy a book, this book, actually, and let me know how it goes.
Bye!